Special Track on AI and Robotics
Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: January 12, 2026
Author information and Full paper submission deadline (including Appendix and resubmission information): January 19, 2026
Summary reject notification: March 4, 2026
Paper notification: April 29, 2026
Conference: Saturday, August 15 to Friday, August 21, 2026.
(all times are 23:59 Anywhere On Earth, UTC-12)
We invite your original quality submissions to the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Special Track on AI and Robotics. The AI and Robotics Track aims to advance foundational AI methods for robot agents and systems. The track is motivated by rapid progress in both AI and robotics and by the growing synergy between generative AI, machine learning, robot control, and structured modeling, representation, and reasoning.
About AI and Robotics: The track considers intelligent robot agency being ultimately about acting successfully in the physical world, while understanding what one is doing, why, how, what the consequences of actions are and how to enforce and avoid them. We therefore solicit original contributions to the AI and robotics foundations that connect learning, representation, reasoning, planning, and control, enabling robots to anticipate consequences, monitor execution, and correct behavior to achieve desired outcomes and avoid harmful ones. We particularly value strong evidence of generalizability, transferability, and robust operation in realistic, open-world settings. The track targets research that develops the conceptual, algorithmic, and architectural basis for AI-powered robotics that can reason about actions, anticipate outcomes, and integrate planning with intelligent execution to achieve reliable, safe, and transferable competence.
Topics of Interest: The Special Track on AI and Robotics invites original research papers that make a clear AI contribution and demonstrate a substantive connection to embodied robotic systems, across perception, reasoning, learning, and control. Submissions should go beyond pure simulation and show relevance to real or realistically embodied robots, including physical platforms and high-fidelity simulators.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas at the intersection of core AI methods and embodied robotic systems.
• Generative AI, robotic foundation models, and reinforcement learning: Vision–language–action models; generative world models for control and planning; model construction, representations, task and policy synthesis from language, demonstrations, or instructional video; grounding large models in real robot interaction with cross-task, cross-environment, cross-platform, and open-domain generalization and transfer.
• Neuro-symbolic and cognitive robotics: Hybrid architectures integrating deep learning with symbolic, logical, or probabilistic reasoning; cognitive robot architectures modeling goals, beliefs, intentions, and plans; dual-process models coupling predictive and reactive decision making with deliberative reasoning and metacognition; mechanisms for introspection and self-monitoring.
• Structured, semantic, and explicit world models, digital twins, and action representations: Structured world models and semantic digital twins; explicit action representations such as task schemas, scripts, and parameterized skills; predictive models that anticipate consequences and support plan generation, execution monitoring, diagnosis, and repair.
• Intentional, causal, and intuitive physics reasoning: Representations and inference for intentions, goals, and affordances; causal models of actions and outcomes; intuitive physics for stability, contact, deformable objects, and fluids; counterfactual reasoning for planning, safety, and explanation.
• Robot control, planning, and execution with guarantees: Integrated task and motion planning with feedback control; safe and robust control under uncertainty; architectures connecting high-level intent and constraints to low-level trajectories; online monitoring, explanation, and adaptation.
• Learning to understand, generalize, and explain actions: Learning representations that support introspective and self-explaining policies; learning from language, corrections, preferences, and sparse feedback; robust generalization and transfer across tasks, objects, environments, embodiments, and long-horizon scenarios.
• Foundations of human–robot interaction and assistance: AI foundations for robot assistance and collaboration with humans, emphasizing explicit representations of tasks, roles, goals, norms, and shared context; formal models of shared autonomy and mixed-initiative control that reason about human intent, preferences, uncertainty, and workload; learning and inference methods for aligning robot behavior with human instructions, demonstrations, and feedback; representations and algorithms for shared mental models, instruction grounding, negotiation of constraints and interpretations, and explanation of robot actions to human partners.
Safety, trustworthiness, generalizability, and evaluation: Verification and validation methods for AI-powered robotic systems; theoretical and algorithmic guarantees on safety, robustness, and out-of-distribution generalization.
Primary Paper Initiative: IJCAI-ECAI 2026 is launching the Primary Paper Initiative in response to the international AI research community’s call to address challenges and to revitalize the peer review process, while strengthening the reviewers and authors in the process. Under the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Primary Paper Initiative, every submission is subject to a fee of USD 100. That paper submission fee is waived for primary papers, i.e., papers for which none of the authors appear as an author on any other submission to IJCAI-ECAI 2026. The initiative applies to the main track, Survey Track, and all special tracks, excluding the Journal Track, the Sister Conferences Track, Early Career Highlights, Competitions, Demos, and the Doctoral Consortium. All proceeds generated from the Primary Paper Initiative will be exclusively directed toward the support of the reviewing community of IJCAI-ECAI 2026. To recognize the reviewers’ contributions, the initiative introduces Peer Reviewer Recognition Policy with clearly defined standards (which will be published on the conference web site). The initiative aims to enhance review quality, strengthen accountability, and uphold the scientific excellence of the conference. Details and the FAQ will be published on the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 website.
Submissions: Research papers are submitted with the same format and following all the Submission Requirements described in general and detailed instructions as for the main conference (https://2026.ijcai.org). Papers are expected to satisfy the highest scientific standards as submissions to the main track of IJCAI-ECAI 2026 and satisfy double-blind review conditions. Double submissions to the special track and main conference are not allowed. Differing from the main track, there will be no phase 1 notification and author rebuttal.
Page limit: Papers must be no longer than 9 pages in total: 7 pages for the body of the paper and 2 pages for references; an optional ethics statement can be placed either in the body of the paper or in the reference pages.
Participation in the conference: At least one author of each accepted paper must participate in the conference at Bremen and present the work. We are looking forward to the community meeting in person. Papers not presented in person will be excluded from the proceedings unless one of the authors provides notification of exceptional circumstances to IJCAI via pcchair@2026.ijcai.org. Any such exceptional circumstances must receive prior approval from IJCAI.
Ethics policy and ethics statement: IJCAI is committed to the highest standards of research integrity. Submissions must adhere to fundamental ethical principles, including the responsible use of datasets (respecting privacy, copyright, and informed consent) and mitigating potential societal harms (such as risks to safety, and issues related to discrimination and bias).
Consistent with the previous editions of the conference, IJCAI-ECAI 2026 will implement a streamlined ethics review policy. Reviewers will be asked to flag glaring violations of ethical principles. Such flagged submissions will be reviewed by the Ethics Chair. In rare situations, the Program Chair, advised by the Ethics Chair, reserves the right to reject a submission on ethical grounds. However, we anticipate that the primary approach to addressing ethical concerns will require authors to revise their submissions to include a discussion that identifies these concerns and proposes strategies for their mitigation.
Authors can include in the main body of their paper, or on the reference pages, an ethics statement that addresses both ethical issues regarding the research being reported and the broader ethical impact of the work. Note that such an ethics statement is not required, but we recommend that papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks include such discussion. The IJCAI review form will include a section asking reviewers and ACs to flag any serious ethical concerns.
Conflict of interest policy: All individuals involved in the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 review process must adhere to the IJCAI conflict of interest policy. Details can be found at https://www.ijcai.org/IJCAI_Conflict_of_Interest_Policy.pdf. All authors of papers submitted to IJCAI-ECAI 2026 agree to be bound by the conditions outlined in this call for papers (w.r.t. multiple submissions, authorship, resubmission policy, submission limit, etc.). Authors and reviewers acknowledge that IJCAI may take action against individuals in breach of the conflict of interest and call for papers policies, including – but not limited to – rejecting their submissions without further review and banning individuals from submitting their work to a limited number of IJCAI conferences in the future.
Confidentiality policy: All submissions will be handled with strict confidentiality until their publication date.
Submission Process
Formatting guidelines: The updated LaTeX styles and Word template are available at https://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit.
Submission site: https://chairingtool.com/conferences/IJCAIECAI2026/ai-and-robotics?role=author
Author Information: Full papers must be submitted through the same site by the paper submission deadline. The list of author names provided at the Author Information Deadline is final. Authors may not be added to or removed from papers following submission. (The author’s ordering may still be changed during the camera-ready period.) Providing accurate author details is essential for managing the paper workflow process. Therefore, all authors must register and fill out the author information form on the submission site by the Author Information deadline. Please note that ORCID is now compulsory! Submissions may be rejected without review if any co-author fails to register and submit the necessary information.
Submission limit: IJCAI-ECAI 2026 will enforce a strict submission limit. Each author is limited to no more than 8 submissions to IJCAI-ECAI 2026.
Accepted research papers will be included in the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 proceedings.
Preprints: The existence of non-anonymous preprints (on arXiv, social media, websites, etc.) and prior publication in non-archival venues will not result in rejection. Note that the submission to IJCAI-ECAI 2026 must always be anonymized regardless of whether a preprint has been released. Reviewers will be instructed not to look for such preprints actively, but encountering them will not constitute a conflict of interest.
Reproducibility: Authors must follow the reproducibility guidelines (available here) and checklist at the time of paper submission.
Dual submissions: IJCAI-ECAI 2026 will not accept any paper that, at the time of full paper submission, is under review for, has already been published in or has already been accepted for publication in a journal or another venue with formally published proceedings. Authors of IJCAI-ECAI 2026 submissions are also not permitted to submit their paper to a journal or another venue with formally published proceedings during the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 review period. (As a guideline, authors should regard publications with a DOI, ISBN, or ISSN as formal publications.
Track Chairs
Tamim Asfour, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Michael Beetz, University of Bremen, Germany
Kento Kawaharazuka, University of Tokyo, Japan
Alessandro Saffiotti , Orebro University, Orebro, Sweden
Alin Albu-Schaeffer, DLR and Technical University Munich, Germany
Track Workflow Chair
Hagen Langer, University of Bremen, Germany
Enquiries
All enquiries about this special track on AI and Robotics must be sent to ai-and-robotics@2026.ijcai.org.